How Much Did The FBI Snoop On Email Messages To Uncover The Petreaus Situation?

from the all-for-what? dept

As you're probably aware since it's "the big story" right now, General David Petreaus stepped down last week after an FBI investigation turned up an affair he'd been having. It seems that every few hours more news "breaks" on the story, and it keeps getting more involved, with a growing number of players (and with each new revelation the story gets more and more bizarre). However, some have started wondering how and why the FBI was snooping on various emails. The original story was that it came about after Petreaus' mistress allegedly sent threatening (anonymous) emails to another woman, who reported them to the FBI. From that came a wider investigation, which supposedly may involve another General and a variety of other players. But some are realizing that this seems to show how the FBI has pretty free rein in terms of snooping on email accounts hosted online:

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older. To get more recent communications, a warrant from a judge is required. This is a higher standard that requires proof of probable cause that a crime is being committed.

But even that isn't entirely clear. Folks like Julian Sanchez have been puzzling through the timeline of events and wondering how a simple investigation into a small number of "rude" (but not illegal) emails then uncovered thousands of questionable emails involving a different general as alleged in the news that broke last night. It feels like the FBI may have taken a simple report of misconduct (which may have been driven by another love triangle issue involving an FBI agent who seemed to take the whole thing a lot more personally than makes sense) and turned it into a massive fishing expedition.

Given how fast new parts of this story keep breaking, I'm sure there are still a number of other dominoes to fall, but hopefully this actually gets people to pay attention to just how easy it is for law enforcement to snoop on people's emails these days based on next to nothing.

No one is safe

Re: No one is safe

Exactly. This is the ultimate wake up call for the need for privacy and oversight of government snooping. When a few top dawgs fall to this kind of thing you will suddenly see congress putting a stop to it.

Re: Re: No one is safe

Countess helped cause this...

Because of the partisanship of our Congress, Eric Cantor tried to user this in October to affect the election.

I find it amazing that Republicans would stoop so low but they hanger always tried to sabotage elections for personal gain since Nixon sabotaged the 68 elections by destroying the Vietnam peace accord.

Re: No one is safe

"Wake up call to Congress" - don't make me laugh, mate!

One of the interesting things that came up in the Jane Harman AIPAC thing a few years ago (http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/the_harman-aipac_story_a_timeline.php) was that the DoJ apparently held a wiretap recording over Jane Harman's head, to get a key vote.

Re: Re: FBI reviewing every email

I didn't say there shouldn't be warrants or court orders, even if they are FISA court orders. And I'm not happy about the distinction between communications older or newer than 6 months. I just think when it's the director of the CIA, a fast and thorough investigation is in order, and if that means they drag up thousands of emails to see which ones matter, that seems normal and it's the way I'd do it.

There's an important difference between surveillance of the CIA, including people who hang out with CIA personnel, and wholesale surveillance of our entire society.

Why do Americans consider this a "normal" thing to happen and allow FBI to snoop on e-mail messages when they want to? Do they expect them to do the same with real mail? I would assume not. But then they should treat e-mail exactly the same, too.

Tenuous rules?

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older. To get more recent communications, a warrant from a judge is required. This is a higher standard that requires proof of probable cause that a crime is being committed.

Given that many if not most people keep all their email in 1 big inbox going back probably years, how exactly does one get access only to the "old email"?
Off the top of my headI can only see two ways:
1/ Get the email provider to pre-filter the inbox and olny hand over the allowed bit... Which seems unlikely since it then costs the provider more in man-hours to action and besides what the hell are they doing snooping through a private inbox?
2/ The ISP hand over the lot and the FBI promise faithfully to not look at anything they shouldn't without a warrant... (Boy, that was hard to type with a straight face)

Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

Who said they get the email from your Inbox?

Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have.
If they need a warrant to look at something they already have that raises a whole bunch of other questions doesn't it? Not to mention making it even harder to keep a straight face when saying they won't look at anything they're not allowed to...

And those are only a couple of the ones we KNOW about.

Indeed... I believe GCHQ do a good line in that too. I can never make head or tail out of the conflicting jurisdictions of the ludicrous amounts of federal agencies in the US, but I'd understood that the FBI technically was supposed to get a warrant to spy on americans and most of the rest supposedly "aren't allowed" (though getting the info from a friendly government that did it for you works I suppose)

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Re: Re: Tenuous rules?

"Well since it was talking about subpoenas one assumes it's something they have to get rather than already have."

Maybe the subpoena is from the prosecutors office to the FBI, or some third party "shell agency".

Then again, it could just be to make it all nice and 'legal' since the government is not supposed to be spying on US citizens. They already have the information, but they subpoena the information so it is in a nice neat package.

It is easy enough for an email provider to do a date range or any other filtering.

I have been asked on more than one occasion to filter over a half million emails down to a few hundred (This was a corporate email dump). It doesn't take long. From who, to whom, Before Date...

Re: Mail Drop

this is a common method for clandistine communication, remember some ranting from U.S security services about how hard/difficult it was to monitor some years ago. Seems the Security services solved that problem, and didn't bother to inform anyone, guess that is why the general used this technique for his affair, there was no memo sent round saying the classic webmail, mail drop was compromised for everyone.

How-ever, Why did the FBI compomise this Intelligence source on such a trite matter, do they want to justify new anti-privacy laws?